“Why did she marry you?”
“I think she was fatigued by my importunities. She was not very strong. But it may be that she married me out of pique. She never told me. I did not inquire.”
“Yet you were very happy with her?”
“While she lived, I was ideally happy.”
The young woman stretched out a hand, and laid it on the clasped hands of the old man. He sat gazing into the past. She was silent for a while; and in her eyes, still fixed intently on his face, there were tears.
“Grand-papa dear”—but there were tears in her voice, too.
“My child, you don’t understand. If I had needed pity—”
“I do understand—so well. I wasn’t pitying you, dear, I was envying you a little.”
“Me?—an old man with only the remembrance of happiness?”
“You, who have had happiness granted to you. That isn’t what made me cry, though. I cried because I was glad. You and I, with all this great span of years between us, and yet—so wonderfully alike! I had always thought of myself as a creature utterly apart.”